Not too much to write about today (since all I do these days is work, eat and sleep and try to scratch out some law school essays in between), but it is Halloween, so in the spirit of things...

Sorry about the insipid Myspace-bathroom-mirror-shot quality of the affair above. Sigh. What can I say? I miss Halloween back in the states. The smell of pumpkin pie, apple cider and autumn leaves... carving jack-o-lanterns and dressing up in crazy costumes and parading through State Street (whilst trying to avoid the riot police...). Oh well. I guess you can do some of those things here, (especially the part about avoiding the police...), but you know, it's just not the same. That and with the whole having to be a grown up thing, with work and earning a living and such. That's the problem with adulthood. Too much work, not enough trick-or-treat loot.

One behind-the-scenes photo after the jump, in case you need convincing that my vanity knows no boundaries...

You would think that the shot at the beginning of this post is something that takes all of three seconds to pull together. You know, grab a camera and a pair of cat ears, head to the bathroom mirror, snap a shot and upload. You would be wrong. Setting aside for the moment that I have my occasional moments of extreme vanity, it's still not a trivial matter to get a usable shot, especially when you're shooting a camera blind while pointing it vaguely in the direction of a mirror. It's easy to get a lot of really crappy shots (misframed, out of focus, just plain unflattering, etc.), and you can't really tell what is usable and what isn't until you look at it up close on a computer screen.

The solution is, of course, to take a crap load of shots and then sort through them later to try and find one that might be useable (the ol' "spray and pray" approach to photography). To get the single photo up above, I ended up taking about 80 shots, most of which weren't very good. Software like Adobe Lightroom 2 makes it a lot easier to drill through a ton of photos to find one you like, but I've gotta be honest with you - one can't help but feel like a total narcissistic dork sitting there sifting through dozens of pictures of oneself in Lightroom wearing cat ears just for the express purpose of posting something on a blog. *sheepish*

So now you know the full extent of vanity that compels me to spend an hour from start to finish just to produce one single silly image of yours truly wearing cat ears for a throw away, 2 paragraph blog entry. Remember kids - cat ears and bathroom mirror Myspace shots - it's serious business :) *laughs*